OK so the picture of the prototype home computer was fake. So what? Do you realize that the personal computer that you have on your desk is more powerful than the IBM 360 mainframes of the 1960's? There are some PCs now that are more powerful than the IBM 370 mainframes.
I did my first programming in college in the early 1970's. The mainframe that the college had would only run batch programs. It only ran one program at a time unlike the PC you are using that runs multiple programs. I had to punch out my Fortran programs and hand them to an operator who would run them through a card reader. Since it was a Fortran program I never had to punch out too many cards. The COBOL programmers' programs were huge. They would walk in with a box of cards. I was always tempted to trip them so they would drop their boxes and get the cards out of order. Heh! Heh! Heh! Even then I was an asshole.
I believe the mainframe we used was a 1401.
From left to right: Card Reader/Punch, CPU, Printer, Tape Drives
I've been working with computers for over 27 years. My first job with TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name) didn't involve computers. I changed jobs in 1977 and that's when I started working on my first mainframe. It was an IBM 370 3033. It was the 2nd generation of 370 processors as the first generation were models 138, 148, 158, and 168.
This is a 3033 processor. One of the two little boxes in back is a PDU (Power Distribution Unit). It took the input power, which had to be supplied by a motor generator, and distributed it to the rest of the computer. The other little box is a CDU (Cooling Distribution Unit). This box distributed chilled water to the computer. All the big mainframes were water cooled.
Our first 3033 had two megabytes of RAM. Nowadays most PC's have a minimum of 128 megabytes and it is recommended that you get at least 256 megabytes. I say get 512. Back then mainframe memory cost about $1 million per megabyte.
The DASD (think hard drives) we used was IBM 3330 DASD. These were the old removable platters that used 16 read/write heads. A bank of 3330s consisted of 8 drives with each drive capable of storing 50 megabytes. The hard drive in my PC stores 60 gigabytes!
This is what a bank of 3330's looked like. The girl was extra. To remove the DASD you flipped a switch which would cause one of the drawers to open up. You'd put one of the doodads on the top of the machine on the DASD, spin a handle on the top, and lift the DASD out of the drive.
The 360 and 370 mainframes were also limited in how much I/O could be attached. They only had 16 channels and each channel could only have 256 devices if it was a block multiplex channel. If it was a byte channel which was used for printers, card readers, tape, and displays it could support less devices. This was also before XA (Extended Architecture) so there were all sorts of other I/O and performance issues.
So looking at the size of stuff that today can fit on a desktop it is easy to see why anyone could believe the picture I posted a few days ago.
I got all the pictures here.
Technical stuff done. Tomorrow I'll be back to normal.
Posted by denny at November 29, 2004 06:57 PMI was here before computers were powered by steam!
Can I use this forum to ask something?
Can I ask those who were here at home back in 1968-1970 if these days are somewhat similar?
What I mean to say is: we were at war then; we are at war now. I saw it then from the 'far side'. I see it today from the near-side. I see it today as almost wallpaper, low-simmer background (as evidenced by EBWAO -(evidenced by walking around observations)).
Not trying to cause no fight or anything radical, but I wonder: if you were 'here' in 1969, is it the same - is it lower temperature...; is it higher on the scale of important-things as impacts YOUR daily-life?
Am I correct that 1969 then was similar to 2004 today? And the extension-question: is today's war nothing but low-simmer?
I'd REALLY like to KNOW what you think!
Dan S
Posted by: Dan S on November 30, 2004 12:23 AMMy first computer was this little home-brewed roll-your-own that was made up of a DTMF so-called keyboard, 3 toggle-switches for Load, Run, Store; a cassette-recorder for secondary storage, soldered-on connections to my B/W tv and some rather cute ramped-wooden legs of my own creation.
Like many of you (perhaps), I was able to make it display "Hello, World!". I etched my own traces, I had a sheet of paper that 'decoded' the hexadecimal-displays of both I & O.
I interfaced the whole shebang through a Visi-Calc concoction called "Magic Writer".
What REALLY gasses me today is that I was NEVER ON A SUBMARINE! :)))) At that time I worked for 'signals & power' for the Model Railroad Club. There were the 'topside'-folk who placed bushes and stations and wanted flashing lights at the crossings and gates that would 'intelligently' go up & down.
I worked underneath the table with "D"-relays and make-before-break logic.
My wiring to this DAY is simply impeccable.
Thanks for the memories!
I have to go teach at 0700, so I'll look for your response after a nice dreamy sleep.
Posted by: Dan S on November 30, 2004 12:40 AMDASD = Direct Access Storage Device (as opposed to)
SASD = Sequential Access Storage Device.
Not sure about that 3003-designation; that would mean a tri-state logic that didn't exist at the time. It would have left the device in an unstable condition.
A '2002'-device decoded as a 2-state (flip-flop-monostable vibrator) that could wind up in any of 2 raised to the power of 2 (=4-states); the 4004 could double that power (hence, Moore's Law) and that led to the 8080 and the 8008.
According to Boolean logic, the numbers go 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc; in other words, they keep doubling. No room for anything 3,5,7 ODD here!
Posted by: Dan S on November 30, 2004 12:58 AMAh memories. My first programming was done in Fortran-S and on punch cards. Paper tape too...remember that?.
Posted by: Robert on November 30, 2004 02:12 AMI started in 1963 on a 1401 and shortly thereafter on the "big boy" - an IBM 7094. 32K memory on the big ones those days.
Posted by: bigdocmcd on November 30, 2004 11:02 AMThanks for the trip down memory lane! I had forgotten about the card reader/punch machines, the sorters which used eam cards and 7 track, 556 bpi tape drives! Oh the good ole days...
Posted by: WarWagon on November 30, 2004 11:21 AMDan - Those were just model numbers. Top of the line IBM CKD (Count Key Data) devices in chronological order. 2914, 3330, 3350, 3380, 3390. After that all CKD DASD was 3390 architecture on DASD arrays. It would take another post to talk about RAID DASD.
On you other comment, 1969 is nothing like 2004. Even thought the MSM is as against this war as they were against Viet Nam, we now have the counterbalance of FOX News, talk radio, and the Blogosphere. And in spite of the left screaming about the casualty count and quagmire over and over here are some numbers to ponder.
American military deaths in previous wars:
* World War II - 408,306
* Korean War - 54,246
* Vietnam War - 58,219
* Operation Iraqi Freedom - 1,251 as of yesterday
Ahhh, yes....memories. The "Sort 7" tape up on drive A to start the process, then dismount it and throw up another scratch tape. A 100,000 record sort would take up most of an 8 hr shift with "Pass 1...Pass 2...etc" messages on the 1403 printer.
And then Mr Murphy would show up with a snapped tape or power failure on pass 11 and you'd have to start all over again!
Running 4 or 6-part forms thru the decollator and having your hands turn black from the ink after 25 boxes or so.
Having operators who accidently "tripped you" while carrying a box of cards just made you understand why they kept hammering in the concept of "numbering your object decks" in school!
Yep - those were the good old days. 32K (not megs!) of memory!
Posted by: Bob on November 30, 2004 02:59 PMJust curious, how does today's PC compare with an IBM 9370. I recall that one being our in house "mainframe" as late as 1993 I believe.
Posted by: Deliverance on November 30, 2004 04:34 PMYes, memories ... I've been at it almost as long as you have, starting as an operator on a mixed bag of Honeywells, Univacs and RCAs. Back when computers had blinking lights and disk drives were the size of washing machines. I'm now a developer, using a laptop with more power and disk space than the last mainframes I was associated with. Hey, it's a good living, indoor work and no heavy lifting.
Deliverance - The 9370, like the 8100 before it was one of those specialized midrange computers that didn't sell very well. Today's PC would kick its ass. BTW, the 8100 and 9370's morphed into service processors for large mainframes. Service processors were responsibe for booting up the microcode on the mainframe. They monitored the mainframe's power and logged errors.
The 8100 was the service processor for the 3081. The 9370 became the service processor for late model 3090's and for all the 9021 series. The current IBM mainframes, which are now the size of a 9370, use PC's as service processors.
Posted by: Denny Wilson on November 30, 2004 09:40 PMI think the TCIDNN is Big Blue.
Posted by: Bubba on November 30, 2004 10:23 PMLate 1960's and GE was trying to create a multi-user OS (Multics). Friday night around midnight the batch processing would cease and the multiuser OS would be loaded. My father was a marketing type and brought home a portable teletype that we dialed in to the mainframe. I played a simple minded game called Gunner and played around in BASIC (with explict line numbers and LET commands). My brother wrote a program to help him with his paper route. The only gotcha was that the multiuser OS was dumped at midnight on Sunday and the batch scheduler reloaded, so my brother wanted to store his program during the week. The challenge: no paper for the tape punch, so Tom had to type his program back in every Saturday. After a little talking with Dad and some soldering iron time a Bell&Howell 1/4 reel-to-reel tape drive was magically attached to the phone and was rolling tape during a program listing.....
Tom played it back into the TTY and got better than 90% accuracy as I recall.
Pretty good for a 14 year old... Tom is now an instrumentation tech at a power plant, and can claim to have operated the DEEPEST unix system on the planet (he was an Alvin pilot and had a Xenix box running at 6000m deep during a dive).
I started in college in 74 with Fortan-4 on punch cards. When I came back after the USN it was WATFIV on terminals in 1982. Fortran on Apollo workstations and VAXen, then PC networking, and now I do storage.
Things are REALLY different (my HP41CX had more memory and a bigger instruction set than the 600 I was playing on in 1968).
As for Iraq vs. Vietnam. Very different, mostly due to the Internet and the Blogosphere. Anyone who wants to read the reports on the ground knows that we are doing a Good Thing in Iraq. We didn't know about the Killing Fields of Pol Pot, the Boat People, and the truth about Stalin's and Mao's genocides then to know that opposing the VC and NVA was right then.
We have seen what can happen if we don't act, and we seem to know that our Boys are doing the best they can in the Sand Box. I haven't heard of many returning vets called Baby-Killers (outside the moonbat Northwest........)
Posted by: Rick T on November 30, 2004 11:48 PMAhh, the Good Old Days. You can have them. I started learning computers on an IBM 360 and 370 at college in the late 1970s. The cheapos at the school only had 4 terminals, so all the underclassmen had to use punchcards. I took FORTRAN first, then made the ultimate mistake. I took Assembly language from a Chinese engineering prof. He had a horrible accent, mumbled, talked in a very soft voice, faced away from the class. I remember one of my programs on punchcards had 280 fatal exceptions and 800 flags on its first run. Oops.
Posted by: Papapete on December 1, 2004 12:41 AMWhat a wonderful response!
Denny, I want $47.36 from your enhanced revenue stream! :)
Seriously: I am gratified to see that there are some 'early adopters' reading along who have learned-opinions.
These days, database connectivity in an OODBMS-environment is what things are all about. Hopefully, I'll be dead & gone before EPIC-2014 is our reality. (EPIC means that anything you ever typed for whatever reason is available for data-massage and Amazon (suggest things) and Googgle (look for things) have become the premier blogster.
I EPIC stands for (these days): Extensible Personal Information Construct. It changes from month-to-month.
I THINK that what this means is that based on what you type/say/input to the DATABASE is available for computer-program selected retrieval and presentation to any unique user.
We would be wise to be aware of the 13 OODBMS rules as postulated by "The Object Oriented Database System Manifesto" Kyoto, Japan, 1989.
While not trying to stifle or scare, EVERYTHING you or I have typed and entered since 1989 has been/is flowing into ever-expanding data marts.
Data marts combine into data warehouses; It will come back to us in custom-asked-for ad hoc structured queries.
The MSM will exist no more, except for elites and elderly. You will log on each day and be assured of your vision from world-wide sources, documented, cited and concise.
I'm not sure if I foresaw this.
Dan S
Algol. B5500. Ga. Tech. 1969.
Posted by: Justthisguy on December 1, 2004 03:01 AMI learned FORTRAN in high school and ran my first programs on an IBM 1170 at the local college. Now I write VB programs on my PC. Sometimes I forget how easy I've got it.
- B
Posted by: bobbert on December 1, 2004 08:27 AMBrings back memories let's see .... 4341 was the first then a 4381 then a 4381 with a dual processor then a 3090 j then a 3090 k then a 3090 600 h I think when all that went away I got into PC's didn't like it much (long line of A$$ hole bosses )so when the telecoms opertunity opened up I took it, and hence my handle
Posted by: livewire on December 1, 2004 09:04 AMI told my kids about this a while back:
Back in the 60's, IBM sponsored a show called 'The 21st Century'. On one show they had a commercial showing they had made the first computer that would fit on a desktop! It covered the whole desktop, had a small b&w screen, could perform the 4 basic math functions, and had some memory.
Then I told them that they could go to Wal-Mart and, at the check-out, buy a calculator little larger than a credit card/solar-powered, yet/ with more computing power than that thing. And the calculator probably costs about $5.
You know, as the resident young girl here, I love hearing stories like these. I've always chuckled at the mainframes of old, while keeping in mind the fact that my slightly-outdated home-built PC (upon which I'm typing this very comment) could run circles around them. I wonder what my son's first personal computer is going to be like...?
The first computer my family got was a tape-driven TI that consisted of the drive, and a keyboard. No memory. You hooked the stuff up to your TV, popped the tape into the drive, waited for the squealing to finish, and then you were ready for rollicking four-bit-color fun.
We played a game that I remember fondly and I'm still trying to find--I've found text versions but still have yet to find any of the later graphic ones--that many of my older computer-jockey friends would recognize in an instant. I killed many a Wumpus that year...until my Dad left a car speaker a little too close to the drive while it was running...
--TwoDragons
Posted by: Denita TwoDragons on December 1, 2004 10:48 AMDo you remember the liquid cooled Amdahl? Gene Amdahl left IBM, got financial backing from Fujitsu, and started building 'em.
Posted by: Sam on December 1, 2004 12:52 PMTwoDragons....I have Hunt the Wumpus cartridge for the TI 99/4a...loved that game. I have the whole expansion system. The 32K memory upgrade. dual cassette storage devices (don't know why I got 2) dual 360K floppy Drives. The 300 Baud acoustic modem. I paid more for that system than my pentium 4 laptop. LOL It's waiting in my garage for it's value to go up from the three cents it's worth now.
Posted by: Robert on December 2, 2004 03:08 AMArg I followed the picture link you posted the 3800 series Printer Man could that thing eat paper... It wasn't quite a cartrige but what would the youngsters think when they saw the toner cartrige/bin/hopper and what you had to go throgh to change it !!!!!!!!!!! LOL
Posted by: livewire on December 2, 2004 09:57 AMHOLY SHIT!!! Robert--that's EXACTLY the same system I had!!!!!! I had the absolute basics, and no modem--but now that you mentioned the name I remember what model it was!
Oh man, I'm so tempted to buy it from you, just so I could play that damn game again!! :-)
Hmmm...how much do you want to sell it for...?
*LOL* It's so funny to think, I enjoy playing some of the most advanced-graphics games that have been made to date--Half Life 2, Doom 3, Far Cry...and the game that still gets me smiling the most involves crooked arrows and a big, red beast. And the sound of "Hall of the Mountain King" played in primordial MIDI...*sigh*
Remember when the Wumpus got you and those big teeth came down from the top and the bottom of the screen? What a riot!
--TwoDragons
Posted by: Denita TwoDragons on December 2, 2004 01:14 PMWe would have KILLED for some 3330s... we had the old "cake tin" 2314 setup.
Fucking hated them.
Posted by: Kim du Toit on December 2, 2004 03:51 PMThe head seek mechanism on the 2314 was hydraulic. When it leaked the CE's used to put paper towels next to the hydraulic assembly until it got bad enough that they had to replace it. They hated to replace it because the head adjustments sucked.
Posted by: Denny Wilson on December 2, 2004 04:05 PMTwoDragons.....the postage would be a fortune...if I could even locate all the pieces...they all worked....and I gave it to you for free. :-) I really thought I was hot shit with such a power system.
Posted by: Robert on December 2, 2004 08:22 PMTwoDragons....do a google search for "hunt the wumpus"...I think yoi'll be pleasantly surprised to see that the wumpus lives ! LOL
Posted by: Robert on December 2, 2004 08:43 PM